New Vance City

At the heart of the Chemical Treatment Tanks lies the Neutralization Pit—a failed containment trench once designed to stabilize hazardous sludge before final filtration. Now, it’s a caustic basin of bubbling waste, where incomplete reactions have fused old purifiers with sludge into a half-living mire. The Pit emits a low, constant gurgle, like it’s digesting something—maybe everything. Attempts to seal it off failed after multiple maintenance teams were lost to collapsing catwalks and unexpected chemical flare-ups. Despite the danger, rogue chemists and black-market harvesters sneak in, drawn by trace elements and volatile compounds no longer producible in labs. The Hegemony rarely intervenes, claiming the area is “self-regulating.” But stories circulate of things moving in the sludge—not rats, not beasts, but glimmering shapes that seem to wait just beneath the surface, twitching in time with the pumps. Some say the Pit is learning. Others say it’s remembering.

The Neutralization Pit yawns like an industrial wound beneath a fractured grid of sagging catwalks and exposed pipework. Its basin, wide and bowl-shaped, seethes with thick, iridescent sludge that bubbles in unnatural patterns—rising in slow, deliberate pulses before hissing back into silence. Rust-streaked walls arc downward in jagged tiers, slick with streaks of yellow-orange corrosion and algae-like chemical growths that shimmer under industrial UV panels. The air wavers with heat distortion and drifting particulate mist—an acrid haze that glows faintly with greens, blues, and oily purples. Warning placards hang askew, half-melted and unreadable, while shattered floodlights flicker above like sickly stars. Along the rim, safety rails curl inward like they've tried to retreat, and occasional sparks crackle from exposed sensor nodes long since overloaded. At the far end of the pit, a slow ooze trickles from a breached vat, merging with the pool below in a hiss of steam and light.